Cleaning up Polluted Areas

In this guide, I will tell you how to simply clean up a polluted area so it can be used for future housing without residents getting sick!

The Big Cleanup

Many of you may have run into this problem, you were forced to zone industry or put incinerators in a certain place early in the game which has resulted in the ground being polluted. If you later want to move the industry and zone residential on or even near the pollution, people will get sick.

I had the same issue on my London map, I have spread out now but the Isle of Dogs was badly polluted. Ironic as this of course happened in London in real life, the area was all industry and docks but has now been transformed into a very fashionable commercial and residential area,


You basically have two options, either change the zoning of the industry to Forestry, or plant loads of trees. Here, i'm going to do both as the trees will actually register as a resource and give your forestry businesses a boost. Here we are just after I've changed the specialty in the Districts menu, have planted quite a few trees while I await the industry to re-build,


It's not long before it will take hold, don't forget you'll need to empty your landfills if you have any,

The End Result

It will take about 18 in game months to clean everything up, here the ground is nice and green all around and the landfills are ready to be bulldozed,


Once it is, you can then de-zone the industry and begin to zone in your shops and housing,


There you go, if you found that useful, please rate and comment.

Happy Building!

[Mice-stro]

commisar rotke it just speeds up the removal of ground pollution.

[Mice-stro]

*has heavy pollution * small playground spam fixes everything within a few minutes. and each park has 24 dollars maintinence. plus a happiness boost. (this is the vanilla fix)

[Commiss4r]

so is forestry better with ground pollution than general? because I've seen farm give ZERO ground pollution...

[simonmd]

This guide was written over a year ago, I have no idea if the game has changed that much that it makes it redundant now as i've not played for a while. If it is the case that an area will clean itself in a year or so then I have to ask CO, whats the point of pollution? If theyve changed the game where the potential future effects of pollution now dont matter, thats a big flaw IMHO.

[Tempest]

@simonmd i think that the process got sped up recently because i made a district "transition" and it only took like 1 year how fast does this go?

[simonmd]

Yes but it takes MUCH longer. This guide is to help people speed up the process.

[Umbo_Scotch]

just to let yall know, all you have to do is get rid of the indutry and the land will clean all by itself. just wait for it to clean before rezoning. no special measures aree required.

[Evelyn]

Thank you so much!

[marine.ct]

So farming really does the job amazingly fast!

[marine.ct]

Great! thanks for this, any tips on polluted lakes? stagnant water currents? like the first map?